Environmental Scanning in Korean Firms: Organizational Isomorphism in Action

Abstract

This paper reports some of the findings of a study on environmental scanning practices in six large Korean firms and compares the results with those of previous studies on scanning conducted in the United States. Such comparisons are made for both the scanning behaviors of individual managers and the structures, roles, and systems of formal environmental scanning units. The overall conclusion that emerges is that while scanning behaviors of American and Korean firms are quite similar, on average, they differ significantly in the extents of inter-organizational variances in the two societies. Scanning practices of U.S. firms are diverse, While those of Korean firms are remarkably similar. Such uniformity in the way Korean firms scan their environments, it is argued, arise from mimetic and normative isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell 1983) and is an illustration of how inter-organizational influences affect firm behavior. The causes and consequences of such inter-organizational homogeneity have important theoretical, methodological, and practical implications, some of which are briefly discussed in the paper.